Sweetness spectrum in wines, sparkling + still
two infographics to help you understand the complicated labeling mess that is residual sugar in wine
It wouldn’t be wine if it weren’t complicated. I get it, the frustration is absurd when it comes the wine world making things super complicated for wine drinkers. It’s almost like the industry wants to keep wine to professionals only by making things that are so basic so complicated. That is wine for you, love it or hate it. I try to make wine as simple as I can in hopes that my friends and their friends can find a wine they like and understand the label terms on their own. So with that being said, let’s look at residual sugar in sparkling and still wines.
Residual sugar, RS, in wine refers to the natural grape sugar left over in the wine after the fermentation process.
All sparkling wines from brut and below, meaning brut, extra brut and brut nature, have such little residual sugar that most people cannot even detect it. As you can see, the brut spectrum is a bit large, 0-12g/L, some will have more residual sugars than others, but until you get into the extra dry sparkling wines, you really won’t be tasting much sweetness.
Still wines are another story. Everything above dry wines, which sadly are not usually labeled, are much sweeter than sparkling wines. This can be very frustrating. I go into a bit more detail in my Riesling wine article.
The bottom line is, taste and try a lot of wines to figure out what you love and what you don’t like.
If you have questions or want more detail to this post, please leave a comment and let me know.
I love this guide! This breaks down what I need to do so perfectly!